


journal keeper

by mellarosa



Series: not too not familiar [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, TAZ Balance, also i just love lucretia a lot, and all her complexities, but not a lot abt anyone else, like before the starblaster, mostly just ramblings about lucretia, we get a lot of fics abt the twins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 02:40:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18306524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellarosa/pseuds/mellarosa
Summary: when lucretia is two and a quarter years old, she runs into her parent’s room at four am, brandishing a children’s book.“what is it, darling?” her mother asks, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. her mom doesn’t say anything, but wonders silently if maybe moving luce to a toddler bed from a crib had been a bad idea. it is very early in the morning.“dog is god backwards,” lucretia says with all the solemnity a two and a quarter year old can muster. “dee oh gee. gee oh dee.”her mother and her mom stare at her for a long moment.“that’s right, sweetie,” her mom says slowly. “that’s... yes.”her parents look over the book later. it’s about a dog who wants to play in the rain. not once is the word ‘god’ written in the blocky, large letters.they set up a shrine to the goddess of scribes and knowledge in their living room later that day.





	journal keeper

when lucretia is two and a quarter years old, she runs into her parent’s room at four am, brandishing a children’s book.

“what is it, darling?” her mother asks, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. her mom doesn’t say anything, but wonders silently if maybe moving luce to a toddler bed from a crib had been a bad idea. it is very early in the morning.

“dog is god backwards,” lucretia says with all the solemnity a two and a quarter year old can muster. “dee oh gee. gee oh dee.”

her mother and her mom stare at her for a long moment.

“that’s right, sweetie,” her mom says slowly. “that’s... yes.”

her parents look over the book later. it’s about a dog who wants to play in the rain. not once is the word ‘god’ written in the blocky, large letters.

they set up a shrine to the goddess of scribes and knowledge in their living room later that day. 

-

for her third birthday, lucretia’s grandmother gives her three notebooks. they’re bound in leather, and lucretia can’t stop stroking the covers, smooth and faintly textured, with the pudgy fingers of a child who hasn’t quite been able to grasp the concept of dexterity.

“isn’t she a little young for something so... nice?” asks lucretia’s mother, who is worried lucretia will spill juice on them. it’s a fair assumption - luce is very fond of grape juice, and the couch shows it.

“then she spills juice on them,” says her grandmother, shrugging. “nothing lasts forever. luce, darling, your mothers tell me you’re reading already, would you show me?” the old woman bustles down over to the grape juice-stained couch and listens, enraptured, as lucretia stumbles her way through a book far past her age level. lucretia spills juice on one notebook that night, and her grandmother waves her wand and the purple splotch disappears.

-

lucretia’s grandmother dies a year later. complications due to old age. lucretia is four years old and she can’t stop tugging at her black dress. some of the other attendants at the funeral give her mothers a nasty look when lucretia pulls a leather-bound notebook and some crayons out during the service, but her mothers don’t stop her.

the first time she cries since her parents explain her grandmother is with the raven queen now, it’s during the wake, and her mom sits down besides her and asks what’s wrong.

“she’s not right,” lucretia sobs. her mom takes a look. “i can’t remember.”

‘grama had black curle hair’ lucretia has written, ‘she did majik and gave me this book. she is with the rayven qween now.’ underneath are several scribbled out drawings. they’re good, for a four year old, but none of them actually look like her grandmother.

“hm,” says her mom, and goes up to the table filled with framed drawings of the deceased, offerings to the raven queen, some burning incense. she grabs the smallest drawing, removes it from the frame, and brings it back. “we’ll get some paste to stick it in later,” lucretia’s mom says, “but for now, just put it between the pages.”

lucretia takes the drawing carefully.

-

by the time lucretia is seven, she has drawers filled with notebooks, at first scrawled in unsure, wobbly letters, words that morph across the pages into stunningly neat and precise penmanship. the first time her mom walks into the room and sees lucretia writing in two books at once, she has to sit for a second.

lucretia’s art is coming along too - long gone are shaky crayon drawings. she’s far surpassed anything her mothers can do. and the other week, lucretia asked if she could learn magic someday.

most parents hope that their children will succeed, hope for geniuses, prodigies, champions. not many know what to do with them when they get their wishes.

-

lucretia’s mothers do their best, though. “why don’t you ever make up your own stories?” her mother asks one day. 

lucretia looks up. “why would i?” lucretia’s eyes are sharp in her young face. “isn’t what’s real most important? we have to remember things.” and indeed, lucretia only ever writes the truth. at first, it was things about her day, descriptions of her toys and her parents. then it was things she heard on the streets, the playground, from her teachers and classmates. stories. history. 

“i don’t like school,” she says during dinner. 

her mothers exchange glances and sigh. they’ve known this was coming. they’ve talked about it. 

“we know it’s too easy,” her mother says apologetically. “we’re sorry, luce - but we can’t homeschool you.” they can’t afford it - lucretia going to the local public school was partly a blessing. they couldn’t work as much when one had to be home all day with their daughter.

“i could move up a grade,” lucretia says, pushing her green beans around her plate. “i can already read better than the older kids. one of them let me see their math book during lunch. i think i can do that, too.”

her mother wants to ask if lucretia will miss her friends, but doesn’t. she knows. 

“we’ll talk to your teachers,” her mom promises.

-

she graduates high school when she’s twelve years old. she’s got a double masters in communication and abjuration a few years later. it’s not long till she’s writing books. biographies. 

lucretia is quiet, introverted. shy isn’t quite the right word - more like caught up in her own head, unsure of how to speak to others. but that’s something she needs to do, because there are so many stories out there, and there’s so much knowledge. 

a boy on the evocation track was messing with a spell above his level. the campus library was burned down. lucretia’s heart aches - it wasn’t even a very good library, but there were student theses in there, newspapers, knowledge that wasn’t kept anywhere else. gone for good. there’s no way to retrieve that when it’s gone, and it terrifies lucretia. when something is forgotten? where does it go? the idea of ‘gone forever’ scares her down to her bones.

lucretia’s magic is focused on protection, and in a way, so is her writing. forgetting terrifies her. she protects knowledge as best she can, and prays its enough. she doesn’t care that her name’s not on the books she ghostwrites. fame isn’t why she’s doing this.

-

lucretia spills wine on one of her journals. the near-black stains blotting out words fill her with a sense of unease. 

she remembers a spell her grandmother once cast - it should be easy. she closes her eyes, thinks of blank white pages, and waves her wand. but the unease drifts into her concentration. she forces it back, but the spell comes out wrong, too powerful.

even with her eyes closed, the flash of white blinds her. she blinks back fuzzy sunspots and grins to see the page clean. 

she walks by a mirror an hour later and stares. her hair is snow-white.

huh.

-

her mother dies when lucretia is seventeen. their world is coming along in leaps and bounds with technology, and clerics can do a hell of a lot with magic, but sometimes people get sick and they don’t get better. lucretia takes a month off of her work, and doesn’t realize it’s the first time she’s taken time off in a very, very long time.

she curls up in an armchair across from her mom, listening to stories, jokes, memories, and writes. this time, her drawings look exactly like her subject. lucretia will not forget. 

-

it’s a complete coincidence that lucretia learns about the light of creation and the building of the ship that will soon be named the starblaster.

she’s here to interview a scientist at the institute for planar research and exploration. he’s a conjurer, and an orc, and he’s had a fascinating life - apparently he’d been the one to spearhead the orcish rights bill four decades ago, not to mention his long list of magical research breakthroughs. 

but his secretary had apparently told him the wrong time, because now lucretia has to sit in this little waiting room for two hours until he gets here, and sure, she’s got enough work to keep busy, but still. 

and then a gnome slams the door open and marches in, and demands, in a very authoritative voice, to see the same orc lucretia’s here to see.

the poor secretary sighs and explains, again, that he won’t be here for another forty minutes.

“i need to see him now,” the gnome says, and lucretia now notices the captains stripes on his red jacket. “one of his idiot grad students fucked up the calculations on the inter-aspect conjuration ports, and the entire test engine blew, and i need someone with a grain of sense to come in and review the entire damn-” he notices lucretia watching him intently. “uhm. would you tell him i came in, please?” he finishes, looking slightly abashed at his outburst, and makes to leave.

“excuse me,” lucretia says, and stands, offering a hand to the gnome captain. “my name is lucretia. do you mind if i ask you a few questions?” she has a talent for sensing people with good stories, but this one is fairly obvious.

“uh, sure?” the gnome replies, blinking, but he takes her hand and his grip is firm, and history is set. 

-

“i think this is a story worth telling,” lucretia says at the press conference, her voice a little shaky, her eyes unable to look out on the sea of people, but her conviction strong. she’s two months and eleven days from turning twenty years old.

-

everyone spends the first few months of that first cycle in their own ways of mourning. they’re working, of course, surveying the planet, learning the language of this world, trying to figure out just exactly what happened.

but in their limited free time, in the pauses between words and actions, cloistered in their small rooms - they mourn in their own fashions.

lucretia writes. she writes furiously, abandoning neatness and careful grammar in favor of words. she only brought a few of her finished journals with her - the mission was supposed to be two months. she’s got her mother’s journal, a purple-stained one with a leather cover, some of her more precious ones, but - so much has been lost. a whole world. a whole history. lucretia writes about this strange new animal planet, but she also desperately tries to get down everything she can about her homeworld. its terrifying. she’s never had to write so broadly. 

when she can gather the courage, she asks her coworkers for something, anything, from their world. 

davenport gives her an unbiased, clinically delivered history of his people. taako and lup give her recipes and pop culture references. barry gives her science and formulas and complex theories that she often has to ask him to repeat slowly. magnus has a weirdly large amount of dog facts. merle talks more about plants than she really wants to hear.

later, decades later, davenport will give her folk stories, talk about his warren. taako will talk about he and lup’s history, and lup will talk about her and taako’s hopes. barry will give her his mother, his anxiety, his love for lup. magnus will still talk about dogs, because he’s magnus, but he’ll also gasp as he realizes ‘dog is god backwards!’. merle will ask her to help him write his own story down.

but for now, lucretia writes alone in her room and clutches her chest as she remembers that so little will be remembered. so much is lost. 

-

as the cycles continue, lucretia slowly runs out of things to write about their homeworld, and it terrifies her, shakes her down to her bones. she shoves the fear deep down and focuses more in the worlds they visit. too often, they’re lost too. 

so much knowledge. so many stories, gone. 

she asks the others to write too, and sometimes they do. some more than others. it isn’t enough, it can’t ever be enough.

-

funnily enough, it isn’t until the cycle with the judges that lucretia understands why she is so afraid of losing knowledge. because, see, that’s what people are made of - memories, knowledge, hopes and dreams and loves and fears. stories. without those, who are we? 

and these people, these six other people, she realizes she loves them. more than anything. 

she doesn’t have time to write, almost never, during that horrible year, but that’s... okay.

her journals are important, but what’s the point of them if she can’t protect their subjects in the first place?

her priorities shift, after that. she still writes - and writes, and writes, and writes - but her main focus is protecting her family. she will keep them safe, at any cost.

\- 

it hurts, when they don’t listen to her plan. can’t they see that it will protect them? can’t they-

can’t-

-

it hurts, seeing the wreckage they make of this last world. it hurts, to see it hurt her family. it hurts to see taako and barry search for lup, to watch the light flicker in magnus’ eyes, to see davenport’s rage directed at himself, to see merle fight back hopelessness. 

but nothing hurts as much as dropping her journals into fisher’s tank. 

she’s died more than her fare share of times, but no death has ever felt as much like dying as this. and it’s a slow death - weeks of carefully editing her own journals, desecrating that knowledge, blacking out the words that must be kept. dropping them and seeing them dissolve, fisher’s beautiful tendrils wrapping around a feast of memories. lucretia goes against the beliefs she’s held for so long as she destroys knowledge herself to keep her family, and this world, safe.

that light in magnus’ eyes flickers out for good as he collapses at her feet. she’s died before. she didn’t know pain this bad existed.

-

lucretia writes for eleven more years. she writes about retrieving the bulwark staff. about trying to help davenport. about employing cam. about wonderland. she writes about her new scars, her wounds, about the twenty years gone because she refused to forget anything. she writes about realizing she needed help, and building the bureau - maureen first, then johann, leon and avi, then killian, carey, brad, boyland, captain bane, even garfield. she writes about magnus’ wedding, merle’s kids, taako’s show, and then she writes in shaky letters about each of their falls. she writes about junior. none of them have drawings. she lost that in wonderland. 

she doesn’t write about the guilt that creeps like maggots under her skin, the fear that chokes her, but that’s fine. that’s unimportant.

-

magnus is talking to johann and fisher, and he’s laughing, and johann’s rolling his eyes but he’s still playing the violin and the music is lovely and fisher is glittering and lucretia pulls out her journal to write and she freezes because she - 

why should she get to remember this? when she’s made magnus forget so much? why should - 

lucretia doesn’t protect and preserve memories. she destroys them. these journals, these notebooks - they’re just a way to erase knowledge. it isn’t safe in her hands.

she puts away her notebook. she doesn’t write anymore.

-

at least she can still protect them.

-

but she can’t, it turns out. the hunger comes and all she’s done is hurt her family irreparably, nearly doomed another world to nothingness. she’s got nothing, and she’s destroyed everything she does have. taako snaps at her and she deserves it, she deserves this. 

lucretia’s lied to herself her whole life, pretended she was preserving and protecting, and look at this - look at what she’s done. 

she-

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be 500 words. i dont think it is anymore. anyway, things will get better. i just didn't really know how to end this chapter so uhhhh yeah.  
> i really love lucretia y'all!!!!! she's got such an interesting complexity to her - like, she's simultaneously too old and too young, she's dedicated to preserving history but she destroys it, she wants to protect everyone and kinda does the exact opposite, she's solemn and full of gravitas, but like, 'hot diggety shit that is a baller cookie'.


End file.
